Felicifia mods

[Arepo]

Prompted by FG's request, I'd like to install a few mods that would make phpBB easier to use.

Ryan, I'm particularly interested in your opinion since you're doing most of the technical work on here, but it'd be good to get requests for any additional features. You might want to check out the most popular downloads, or search this forum to see if something specific exists - but keep in mind we presumably can't use mods for phpBB 2 versions.

The list of v3 mods might be more helpful, but you can't sort them.

(bear in mind we're using phpBB 3.0.2 at the moment - Ryan, there's info on updating that might mean more to you than me on the system tab on the admin panel - though it sounds as though we'll need the password reset to be able to proceed)

Browsing the phpBB forums list, the following seem good:

Simple Syndication - RSS and ATOM Webfeed syndicator - or Simple RSS mod for phpBB3 - Will enable you to put a RSS feed on your phpBB3 Forum.

Userfriendly URL-input while posting - makes inputting URLs easier, but it's designed for phpBB2. I haven't yet found anything similar for 3, and I presume 3's not backwards compatible...

YouTube video BB code - Adds a new bbcode allowing you to easily embed videos from YouTube.com. (again, version 2 though)

Prime Self Topics - Adds a "View your topics" link next to the "View your posts" link.

Welcome PM on First Login - Allows administrators to create a message that will be sent to newly registered users upon their first login. (How do people feel about getting these? I usually find them annoying, but I suppose if they gave a useful guide to the forum they might be worth considering... (but by the time people register, will they have already looked around the forum?)

Quick reply for phpBB3 - adds quick post form at viewforum and quick reply form at viewtopic, fully customizable from ACP/UCP. Allows quick quoting of selected text and quick nick insertion at viewtopic.

Last post titles - Displays the subject of LAST POST posted in a forum (I'm very keen on this one if I understand it right - I often get interested in a forum that I'm just passing through when I see a topic title that draws me)

Genders - allows your members to specify their Gender. They can chose between "Male", "Female" and "None specified".

NB - Ryan, we should postpone selecting a default skin/designing a logo until we've selected which mods we want to use, since some (all?) of them seem skin-dependent - usually on ProSilver.

[Arepo]

I've just skimmed the complete list of v3 mods, and a few more caught my eye. I'm not suggesting we install all of them - maybe have a veto process, where we try to quickly rule out any that we don't like, giving a simple reason.

Advanced Meta Tags

This mod automatically generates keywords and description Meta Tags based on the topic. When no topic is being viewed, Meta Tags displays global values set in the Admin Control Panel. MOD is validated for SEO use.

Board3 Portal

Portal front page for phpBB3, complete with blocks and installer. (maybe one for later? Doesn't seem like it would be immediately beneficial... but I'm not certain I understand the description)

MOD Version Check

Adds a version check to your board to keep up to date on all your mods.

New Topic Button In Topic

Adds a 'New Topic' button into existing topics.

Prime BBCode Spoiler

This MOD will add a Spoiler BBCode, which obscures text in a box until the user clicks on it.

Prime Login via E-Mail

This MOD will let a user login with either their username or e-mail address. It will also prevent a user from registering with a username that matches another user's e-mail address.

Prime Notify PM

This MOD will insert the message body of a private message into the private message notification e-mail (and will insert the private message subject line into the subject line of the e-mail).

Prime Quick Login

This MOD will add a login area to the top of every page.

SEO MOD

Gives your forum static URL's. (can anyone tell me what the significance of this is? It doens't seem like URLs change at the moment...)

Skype Mod

Allows users to enter a skype profile which, if activated in skype, will show that users status on skype and allow other users to "call" them.

Smilie Creator

With this mod you can add some smilie signs to your forum.
Use this MOD as a custom bbcode or with a smilie creator popup.

User Blog Mod

Adds Blogs to a phpBB3 board.

View or mark unread posts

Adds a 'View unread posts' or 'You have no unread posts' link on the index page (and, for subsilver2, each other page). Also adds a 'Mark post as unread' link at the bottom of each post.

Tabulated survey at topic head

Allow users who are entitled to post polls to design surveys that will appear at the top of a topic. Users will be able to respond to the survey by clicking a button...each user response will appear at the topic head

[RyanCarey]

I'll install them one or two at a time so that we can feel confident that I'm not mucking the forum up.

I think we should get:
Simple syndication or [/i]Simple RSS mode for PhpBB3[/i]
Last post titles (we should decide whether to install Last post titles or first post titles)
Spoiler code
Skype mod
User Blog Mod
Quick Reply for PhpBB3

Also, we should get mods for youtube and for easy links.

I don't think we need:
Gender (it's irrelevant)

other comments:
I agree that our current URLs seem to be static. I think that the SEO mod must replace (static) letters and numbers with (static) relevant words. The theory being that this moves you up to the top of search engines' rankings.
I wonder what the tabulated survey is. Does it involve qualitative answers?
the view unread posts button shouldn't be necessary. You can view unread posts across all forums
here: http://www.felicifia.org/search.php?search_id=active_topics
and here: http://www.felicifia.org/search.php?search_id=newposts

If there are no objections, I'll put up spoiler tags soon (i.e. this evening). If that's successful we can apply some bigger mods.

[RyanCarey]

[Reveal] Spoiler: It seems

That our first mod is online

edit: wow, I'll find a way to lighten that spoiler cover soon.

[spoiler=It seems]That our first mod is online[/spoiler]
edit: wow, I'll find a way to lighten that spoiler cover soon.

[Arepo]

Also, we should get mods for youtube and for easy links.

There's a YouTube mod linked above, but I couldn't find (on the main phpBB site) anything to make URLs easier to input in phpBB v3.x

[RyanCarey]

Hi, again. That is our second mod installed. There was significant downtime again and I apologise for that.

Our new feature is Quick Reply for PhpBB3. To me, it looks lovely, works just as it should. I find that quick-reply boxes generally make a forum a lot smoother and more enjoyable to use. I've noticed that we can now take quotes and put them in the quick reply box too. You just highlight the passage you want and click the 'quote' link beneath the avatar. I think it's just fantastic. Anyway, please let me know how you find Quick Reply.

[Arepo]

What skin are you using, Ryan? I've noticed that these mods don't work universally - the quick reply option doesn't appear and the spoiler tags don't actually hide text in Nexus at least. Do you know of any way to make things appear on other skins, or is this a reason to use ProSilver as our default after all?

[RyanCarey]

At this stage, they're only working on prosilver. That's what they're made for. I should certainly back up some of the other skins and then try these mods out on them though.

[DanielLC]

Why do we have spoiler tags on a forum about utilitarianism? What are we going to use them for?

There are five people playing on a railroad track. You and a very fat man are standing next to the track. You see a train coming. Should you push the man in front of the train so it won't run over the people playing on the track?
No. It's a train. There's not a man in the world fat enough to stop it.

[Arepo]

We want Felicifia to be a community of utilitarians and consequentialists, not necessarily a discussion forum for (only) utilitarianism and consequentialism. Spoiler tags probably won't see much use in the 'reason' forums, but if people are chatting about movies they've enjoyed, or puzzles they found challenging, why not?

[RyanCarey]

You're right, of course, Arepo
However, I suspect DanielLC was joking

[RyanCarey]

I'm going to back up felicifia.org then attempt to add quick-quote to Nexus in two nights. If this goes well, I'll do some more of these mods. If anyone would like to post suggestions of which mods are high priority and which are low, please do!

[Arepo]

I would suggest prioritising the mod which lets you view thread titles from the forum overview page.

After that, if you can find one that makes URLs easier to enter that would be good - but I'm not sure that such a mod exists for this version of phpBB.

Other high priorities in no particular order:

The Prime mods
An RSS mod
A YouTube embedding mod

[ETA] I would also suggest prioritising adding mods (that work with ProSilver) to adapting mods to the other styles, since that's what phpBB claims 77 of our 85 (?) users are using.

[RyanCarey]

This post tests that the spoiler code and the quick reply are working in Nexus.
There aren't any mods on http://www.phpbb.com to make URLs easier to enter so I've put that one on hold: sorry faithlessgod.
I'm installing Last Posts Titles to prosilver at the moment
testing testing.

[DanielLC]

How about better security? When I logged on, the URI started "http://" rather than "https://".

[RyanCarey]

Hi DanielC, if you would like me to pass on a message regarding security to James (a more technically minded guy who is able to offer assistance) I'll do that. I had imagined our forum to be a low security risk.

[DanielLC]

I think I might just be OCD about security. It just seems wrong not to have our passwords protected. Of course, if someone is going to be getting people's usernames and passwords, I don't think they'd be any less likely to use this one.

[RyanCarey]

I'll ask about the security issue Daniel.

btw, the RSS mod is fixed.

[RyanCarey]

I've added the last-post titles to Nexus's main page.
So Nexus now has all Prosilver's mods except for the broken RSS mod. I'll work on prosilver's RSS mod on Monday.

[Arepo]

I don't know if it's a mod, but another suggestion while you're doing this stuff is to figure out how to change the size of the borders, to something more like RDforums'. I think a) they look a bit neater, b) they make the forum stand out a bit among others with the same or similar skins, and c) according to web guru Jakob Nielsen, people find it easier to read fewer words on a line from a screen. I seem to remember his ideal being about 12 words per line, which is unusual for a web forum. (BBC news averages just over that at about 13-14 per line, and I don't know of any major sites with less). Still, cutting it down would almost certainly be a plus, and if we could easily experiment with larger default fonts that meant lines averaged to about the BBC's number it might be worth a go.

[RyanCarey]

Alright, I've got that RSS mod to a level that I'm happy with.
So now prosilver and nexus both have the same four mods.

Regarding security DanielC, our more technically minded James Evans replied:
"Is any sensitive information
being exchanged on the forum? If not, then HTTPS is not necessary. The
server has a number of security measures in place to protect us. HTTPS
is only important when sending confidential data over the wire as it
encrypts packets sent between the server and client."

I've changed my mind about Skype mod and User Blog Mod. We all know how to use skype and blogs and I don't see it as particularly advantageous to integrate these into the forum at this stage.

It seems like the next priorities should be:
search engine optimisation
experimenting with words per line (I don't want anything to become out of proportion)
putting spoiler code into the other styles (later)

[Arepo]

I'd quite like to put the YouTube mod somewhere on that list, since videos are rapidly becoming a major part internet discussion.

Next down the list might be the View or Mark Unread Posts and the New Topic Button in Topic mods - both of which sound a bit bland but (esp the latter) are the kind of things that are irritating when you realise you want them and don't have them.

They should prob go below search engine optimisation on the list. Re that issue, I found this description of dynamic vs static URLs, which implies that the static URL mod would be a big benefit to visibility (although with a few caveats at the bottom of the doc). I'm not sure how it would actually work for a forum, though - do you think we'd lose the ability to link to specific posts? Or would anchor links retain dynamic urls but whole thread views switch to static?

Btw, I've just noticed the new spoiler style - it looks way better now

[Arepo]

Since you seem to be getting the hang of modifying mods, do you think it would be possible to bold the thread titles you now see from the list of forums screen (in line with the vbb look)? I think it's a really cool feature that we'd like to stand out (although maybe not if bolding means we don't get as many characters displaying). No idea if that kind of change is possible, though...

[RyanCarey]

You can now add youtube videos e.g.

Code: Select all

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=sBdQhLXTvNM[/youtube]

You can now add youtube videos e.g.

Code: Select all

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=sBdQhLXTvNM[/youtube]